‘The inquest on Mrs Foster this afternoon,’ he said to Detective Sergeant Lambert. ‘You can drop me there, say a quarter to three.’ He ran a hand over his springing hair, the colour of old carrots. ‘I’ll give you a ring when it’s over. You can come along and pick me up.’
‘It’ll be suicide, of course,’ Sergeant Lambert said. The enquiries into Mrs Foster’s death had proceeded along a straightforward path. Perfectly clear-cut case.
The Chief nodded. No suggestion of anything else. According to the medical report Mrs Foster had swallowed a fatal dose of pain-killing tablets at a time when her husband was sitting with a highly respectable estate agent in full view of several people in the lounge of the Falcon Hotel seventy miles away in Lowesmoor. She was dead before her husband said goodnight to the agent and went upstairs to bed.
The Chief peered out at the driving rain with bleak hostility. ‘Filthy day,’ he said irritably. Rainy weather never agreed with him. Made him sneeze. Something to do with atmospheric pressure, he thought vaguely, made the lining of his nose congested.
‘I detest October,’ he added sourly. What he really detested was inquests. And, in particular, inquests on suicides. They always made him feel horribly depressed.
He felt a sudden powerful yearning for something sweet to thrust into his mouth. It was now some time since he’d succeeded in giving up smoking and it was only rarely that he still felt the old primitive longing for the death-dealing cigarette.
He’d managed very well on bags of toffees and bars of chocolate but now it seemed that even the confectionery substitute was forbidden.
‘You’ve got to lose that,’ the doctor had said at his last checkup, slapping the roll of flesh that strove against the Chief Inspector’s waistband. ‘If you’ve got to run after a villain you’ll have a heart attack, like as not.’
‘I don’t run after villains any more,’ Kelsey said. ‘I let the lads chase about these days.’
‘Can’t rely on that,’ the doctor said without sympathy. ‘Never know your luck. You’ll drop down dead one of these days, I shouldn’t wonder.’
So now the soothing chocolate-covered peanuts were out, the cheering lumps of cracknel and nougat. Kelsey was reduced to biting through pencils and chewing the ends of ballpoint pens into distorted pulp.
His waistband had certainly slackened but his nerves had tautened. You can’t win, he thought, staring out at the relentless rain. If the heart attacks don’t get you, the ulcers will.
He turned abruptly from the window. ‘Don’t be late,’ he told Sergeant Lambert with vague menace.
Always a gathering of cranks and ghouls at an inquest. If he was forced to stand about waiting for the car he’d be an easy prey for every local nutter eager to dredge up old grievances and many another new one invented on the spot. ‘I phone you,’ he said to Lambert, in case the message still hadn’t got through, ‘you come running.’
Promptly at a quarter to three Sergeant Lambert dropped the Chief outside the Cannonbridge courthouse. Kelsey made his way inside, saying what had to be said as briefly as possible to official or semi-official faces here and there.
He took his seat alone, making it clear by the expression on his craggy features and the set of his powerful shoulders that he wasn’t seeking company.
A minute or two after he settled himself into his seat, Gerald Foster came into the courtroom. He looked pale and composed. But then he always looked pale and composed.
Kelsey watched him as he sat down. Until the recent enquiries he’d never spoken to Foster, although he knew who he was. In these unhappy dealings over the last few weeks he had found Foster direct and straightforward, easy to deal with.
Foster was considered locally to be a shrewd and soundly principled man of business. He was certainly respected in the community, although he lived quietly and took little part in local social activity.
Nor had the Chief Inspector ever met the late Mrs Foster, the subject of the inquest. As far as he could make out he had missed little. In the course of his enquiries the lady had come through to him as a right spoiled darling, a regular Daddy’s little girl.
Kelsey had been acquainted with Daddy. A decent old chap, Duncan Murdoch, old-fashioned even in his own day; wing collars, striped trousers, silver-headed cane. Could hardly blame him for making such a close companion of Vera, his only child, particularly when you remembered that his wife had died at Vera’s birth.
But Murdoch had certainly done his daughter no favour, he’d made her over-dependent on himself emotionally, made it difficult for her to form other relationships.
It had struck Kelsey in the course of his enquiries that Vera Foster seemed to have no close woman friend. Several women in the village of Abberley knew her, of course, but each in turn had said more or less, ‘Of course, I didn’t know her well, you couldn’t really say I was a friend, more an acquaintance.’ Certainly none of them seemed grief-stricken by her death, or even particularly moved or surprised by it.
The whole village, it appeared, had known of her earlier attempt to take her own life, when she had swallowed a large quantity of sleeping tablets prescribed for her father. There had been a strong attempt to hush it all up and the episode had certainly never reached Kelsey’s ears. But it had got about the village all the same.
I doubt if Vera would have married at all if her father hadn’t died, Kelsey ruminated. She was over thirty at the time of his death and had never, it seemed, had a boyfriend. She had gone about with her father – not that the pair of them went anywhere very much.
Easy to imagine how desperately she might have looked about after his sudden death for someone else to lean on – and there was no one but Gerald Foster.
She was lucky he was there, Kelsey reflected. In that unhappy time Foster was kind, helpful and sympathetic – according to the village. He wasn’t some adventurer blown in on a wind of chance, capable of springing ugly surprises later, he was well known to Vera, liked, trusted and esteemed by her father.
He was experienced in the business, an employee of several years’ standing, of proven worth, ready and able to take over the running, relieve her of worry.
And he was above all a single man, free to marry her.
If any part of that fortunate combination of circumstances had been different or absent, the Chief Inspector mused, Vera’s life might have taken a very different course nine years ago.
The Lynwood housekeeper, Alma Driscoll, and the two Pritchard men, old Ned and his son Bob, followed Gerald Foster into the courtroom a few minutes later. Probably been given a lift by Foster, Kelsey thought. But they preserved a deferential distance between themselves and Foster when they took their seats; the three of them ranged themselves together at the end of a row.
Edith Jordan came in now. She had stayed on at Lynwood for some days after Vera Foster’s death, to give what assistance she could. She had then been sent by the agency to another temporary post, that of assistant matron at Orchard House, a high-class boarding school for girls near Wychford, a small town ten miles to the west of Cannonbridge.
Kelsey’s eyes rested on Miss Jordan. She had a certain air of breeding, of natural elegance. She was dressed in a dark grey tailored suit with a white blouse and a small hat; she wore no make-up. Her whole appearance suggested native taste and refinement. She looked the kind who could be relied on to keep her head in an emergency. Certainly Doctor Tredgold thought highly of her.
Not what you would call attractive, Kelsey pondered, and yet her features and general aspect had nothing irregular or ill-proportioned about them.
I think it’s mainly because she gives the impression of having no interest in men, Kelsey